The week of Monday, September 28 through Sunday, October 4, 2026.

The bottom line

Bitcoin ended the week higher, standing at $85,925.70 on Monday morning, up 3.6% after trading between $82,776.25 and $87,149.58. Rising long-term US bond yields kept a lid on every rally, while softer inflation and jobs data gave it short bursts of support. Spot Bitcoin fund flows turned mixed after a nine-day buying streak ended. The next big scheduled test is the US inflation report on October 14.

The headline

Bitcoin spent the week boxed between $82,776.25 and $87,149.58, a range set less by Bitcoin-specific news than by the US bond market. The 30-year Treasury yield climbed to its highest level since 2002, and both cooler August core PCE data and a soft September jobs report sparked pushes higher that faded. The sharpest reversal came Friday, when price cleared $87,000 on the payrolls miss and then fell back below $84,000 as liquidations neared $600 million. By Monday morning the price stood at $85,925.70, up 3.6% on the window, after Bitcoin closed its best third quarter since 2017, up roughly 43%.

Price and macro backdrop

The window opened at $82,929.92 and printed its low of $82,776.25 on Monday, September 28, as Iran strike risk and a jump in Treasury yields weighed on risk assets. The high of $87,149.58 came on Friday, October 2, during the payrolls rally. The average price across the window was $84,495.33. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index started at 73 and ended at 70, ranging from 65 to 74 with the low on October 4: greed, but cooling. The tape was psychologically bearish around each failed breakout and structurally intact underneath, with the daily trend measures covered below still pointing higher.

Cross-asset moves were muted. The S&P 500 returned -0.27% on the window and ended at 7,722.72. Gold ended at $4,187.70, close to where it started, after a high of $4,243.10 on September 30. The VIX finished at 16.30 after peaking at 17.37 on October 1. Bitcoin’s 30-day correlation with the S&P 500 sits at 0.60, a coupled reading, while its correlation with gold sits at 0.48, a loose one. Strategy (MSTR) closed at $160.01 after trading between $152.94 and $165.66, with its premium to the value of its Bitcoin holdings at 22.1%.

The macro backdrop leaned restrictive. The dollar index read 120.33 in a strengthening regime over the past 30 days. The 10-year real rate stood at 2.88% and the 5-year at 2.65%, with the fed funds rate at 3.88% and year-over-year CPI at 3.4%. Financial conditions stayed loose by the Chicago Fed’s measure, with the NFCI at -0.548, and high-yield spreads sat at 3.24%. Net liquidity rose $22.7 billion week over week to $5.79 trillion, a small tailwind against the yield headwind. Consumer sentiment remained weak at 51.7.

Technical setup

On the daily chart, Bitcoin closed at $86,171.41 with a 14-day RSI of 66.68, short of the 70 line that marks overbought. Price sits at 0.74 on the Bollinger %B scale, in the upper half of the band, 20.4% above the 200-day simple moving average of $71,582.92 and 8.4% above the 50-day at $79,492.40. The daily MACD histogram turned slightly negative at -42.10, a sign that upside momentum has flattened even as the trend structure holds. On the hourly chart, RSI sits at 57.52, a neutral reading.

ETF flows

Spot Bitcoin ETF flows split by issuer. BlackRock’s IBIT took in $237.2 million across the window, including a $195.6 million day on October 1. Fidelity’s FBTC lost $157.0 million, driven by a $125.6 million outflow on September 30. Bitwise’s BITB shed $38.6 million and Grayscale’s GBTC $31.4 million, while ARKB added $25.5 million, Grayscale’s mini BTC fund $14.6 million, and MSBT $9.4 million. EZBC, BRRR, and BTCW recorded no net flow.

The streak story turned midweek. A nine-day inflow run worth about $3 billion ended Wednesday with roughly $149 million in net outflows, then October opened with $103 million in inflows led by IBIT. The broader trajectory remains strong: September brought $2.65 billion in inflows, the second-largest monthly total since October 2025, and the third quarter closed with $6.3 billion.

On-chain and mempool

Hashrate averaged 962.04 EH/s and ended the window at 946.47 EH/s, after a high of 1,088.29 EH/s on September 29 and a low of 868.74 EH/s on October 4. The start-to-end change was -0.9%, a flat result for the week.

Fees stayed at the floor. Median and 90th-percentile fee rates held at 1 sat/vB for the entire week, so there was no congestion premium for anyone broadcasting. The mempool transaction count peaked at 100,948 on September 30 and ended at 68,509, down 13.8% on the window, while virtual size ended at 39.6 million vbytes. Total fees waiting in the mempool briefly spiked to 30,625,768 sats on October 2 during the volatility, then fell to 5,835,403 sats by Monday, down 43.4% from the start of the window. On the infrastructure side, Core Lightning and Electrum shipped urgent patches after attackers targeted unpatched nodes, and Peter Todd joined MARA to lead its private mempool relay, Slipstream.

Derivatives

Funding stayed positive all week with no flip. The current rate of 0.0098% sits above the seven-day average of 0.0027%, so longs are paying shorts at a higher rate than the weekly norm. The latest CFTC report, dated September 29, showed open interest of 19,596 contracts, or 97,980 BTC worth $8.28 billion, and current open interest stands at $8.42 billion. Leveraged funds trimmed about 5,300 BTC equivalent of futures shorts, though longs shrank too, and short liquidations topped $120 million during Friday’s run above $87,000.

Order book regime

The order book tilted toward bids on Monday morning. The imbalance score read 0.17 against a 24-hour average of -0.035, a shift from mildly ask-heavy to bid-heavy. Bid depth within 2% of the mid stood at 7.95 against a 24-hour average of 7.79, while ask depth sat at 5.64 against an average of 8.32, so the offer side has thinned. The spread was tight at 0.0012 bps versus a 24-hour average of 0.0088 bps, and the most prominent wall sat on the bid side just under the $85,928.58 mid.

News and policy threads

The dominant thread was rates. The 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since 2002, near 5.6%, and repeatedly capped Bitcoin’s attempts higher. Cooler-than-expected August core PCE data lifted price above $85,000 on Wednesday before yields reversed it, and Friday’s soft September payrolls report produced the same pattern at a larger scale. CryptoQuant described the pullbacks as a healthy correction within an intact bull market, while flagging short-term holder profits at a 21-month high and noting that large holders kept buying as retail stayed flat.

Corporate treasuries kept accumulating through the dip. Strategy bought 1,665 BTC for $142.7 million, its first back-to-back weekly purchase since June, lifting its holdings to 847,666 BTC. Strive added 1,107 BTC, pushing its treasury past 27,400 BTC. Citigroup raised its 12-month Bitcoin target to $113,000 and lifted its target on Strategy as well.

Policy and custody headlines broadened the institutional picture. The SEC proposed a crypto custody framework on October 1, its ninth crypto action since mid-August. Absa became the first bank on the African continent to custody Bitcoin. The IMF approved a $139 million disbursement to El Salvador while still pressing the country to scale back its Bitcoin program. On the security front, Bitget customers withdrew more than 4,000 BTC within an hour of the exchange resuming withdrawals after a $388 million hack, and a federal judge blocked nine victims from recovering a share of 127,000 seized Bitcoin.

The week ahead

The next CPI report lands on October 14, nine days out, and it is the next scheduled macro test for a market that has reacted sharply to every inflation and labor print. The FOMC meets October 27, 22 days away. Until then, Treasury yields remain the variable to watch: the week showed that Bitcoin can absorb soft-data rallies and liquidation flushes without breaking its range, but not yet hold above $87,000 while long-end yields sit near multi-decade highs. The halving cycle stands at 61.5% complete, 898 days since the last halving.

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onlyhashes.com publishes a weekly Bitcoin review every Monday morning. The data behind this post is generated by Bitcoin Sidekick’s OreRelay infrastructure: Bitcoin-only, no third-party trackers, no altcoins. Disclosures: this is editorial commentary on publicly available market data; nothing in this post is investment advice.